Saturday, December 26, 2009

Patent Grabber 5.7 is now available for download from the Blazing Dawn Software web site. As mentioned in my previous posting, this version adds the option of including patent family identifiers in a spreadsheet of bibliographic information for U.S. patents. This is a great convenience when you are reviewing a large portfolio of patents from a single company, as it allows the spreadsheet to be sorted by patent family.

Monday, December 7, 2009

I once had to analyze the patent portfolio of a company. They had 179 U.S. patents. So I used Patent Grabber's "US Patent Biblio" feature to start with. That gave me a spreadsheet with the bibliographic information for all 179 patents in a couple of minutes.

But with that many patents, I thought it would be useful to be able to group them into their families. That is why I developed Family-izer(TM). Once I had the family information, I gave each family an arbitrary number and entered those numbers in a new column of the spreadsheet. It took a couple of hours, but when I was done I could sort the spreadsheet by family as well as by any of the other columns.

So now I had a brainstorm. Why spend a couple of hours entering patent family identifiers, when I could add Family-izer functionality to the US Patent Biblio feature! I should be able to automatically get a spreadsheet that already had each patent family assigned an identifying number. No more manual labor!

I have gotten it working. Now I need just a little more testing. Look for Patent Grabber 5.7 in the near future!

Starting with Family-izer(TM) 2.4, users are no longer restricted to entering only U.S. patents and published applications in the Family-izer search field! With the simple inclusion of a two-letter country code, users can now start with a patent or publication number from many different countries.

Friday, November 27, 2009

Patent Grabber 5.6.2 is now available. This is a minor update that eliminates the downloading of duplicate pages in some international patents. On the Search screen, it also eliminates run-on words in the text of PCT publications.

Many thanks to Patent Grabber users David and Bob for alerting me to the duplicate page bug!

I received one report from a ChecksQuick user that he was unable to print his checks under Snow Leopard. That turned out to be a false alarm. The user needed to update his printer driver. Once he did that ChecksQuick printed fine under Snow Leopard.

During the time he could not print under Snow Leopard, that user got around the problem by downloading the Windows version and running ChecksQuick under Windows 7 via VMWare Fusion. So ChecksQuick runs fine under Windows 7, too!

Saturday, August 29, 2009

I am happy to report that the user who had problems with the C42PDF helper application under Windows 7 (64 bit) when using Patent Grabber 5.5 did not experience the problem under Patent Grabber 5.6! So users should be able to download US patents and applications under Windows 7 using Patent Grabber 5.6.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Patent Grabber 5.6 is now available for download from the Blazing Dawn web site. This version adds the ability to create a spreadsheet of bibliographic information from a list of U.S. patents. A couple of users had requested this feature, and it is now a reality.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

A Windows user of Patent Grabber was trying out Patent Grabber under Windows 7 and found that the C42pdf helper application was not converting USPTO TIFF page images into PDF format. He had no problem with PCT publications in which the pages are already in PDF format, so the PDFTK helper application is properly combining the individual PDF pages into a single PDF file under Windows 7.

Has anyone else experienced problems under Windows 7? Has anyone used Windows 7 to download US patents without a problem? Please let me know. Thanks.

Saturday, May 16, 2009

I just discovered that downloading an INPADOC Legal Status report using Patent Grabber requires that the Japanese document number be the publication number of the "laid open" patent application. Using the granted patent number will likely turn up the wrong invention since the Japanese Patent Office can use the same number for totally different inventions.

If you find that doing an INPADOC query using a Japanese number results in a report for a totally unrelated invention, then it is likely that the number you are using is a granted patent number. If you search at Espacenet using that number, you will get several hits. One of them will be the invention that you are looking for, and you can get the Japanese laid open publication number from that hit.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

A couple of users have asked me to add the ability to download just bibliographic information for a list of patents to Patent Grabber. The information would be put into a file that could be opened as a spreadsheet. I have started doing so. For U.S. patents, the information would be:

Saturday, March 28, 2009

A Patent Grabber user in Israel must have lost his registration info. So when his copy of Patent Grabber reverted to "trial" status (maybe he moved it to a new computer), he purchased an upgrade again! What he should have done was send me an e-mail asking for his registration info. I have records of all registered users, so I do not have any problem with sending someone their registration info.

I was recently contacted by a Patent Grabber user from Maryland who said that he was having problems printing downloaded patents. His specific problem was that each page was taking 30 seconds to print on his "fast printer." He was using Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard to print the patents. I asked him to send me a copy of a problem patent. While I am waiting for his response, I would like to know if anyone else has ever experienced this problem. Please let me know.

Welcome to the Blazing Dawn Software blog! We will use this blog as our communications tool to alert you to issues, give you tips, and generally let you know what is going on with our software. So check back here every once in a while so that you can keep up to date.